American b. 1972  —  Brian Lotti is a Los Angeles based painter. Lotti often sketches outdoors for source material, plein-air, and uses varied swathes of vibrant color, quick staccatos, and heavy impasto strokes to form alleys, figures, horizons, color blocked houses on hills, and feathery trees to capture the spontaneity of atmosphere, light, and movement in the immediate environment. Lotti’s longtime involvement with skateboarding, as a pro rider and later filmmaker, has allowed him to contextualize the shift of the skater from anti-establishment aggressor to one who is intimately connected to the urban landscape; fully aware of and at peace with its oppression and its liberation. In like ways, a skateboarder steeped in recreation and observation, is hypersensitive to the street as an aesthetic subject concerned with translating physicality, sensuality, and emotions. Lotti uses the language of Expressionism and Impressionism to describe the fleeting, dynamic, and visceral experience of urban landscapes. In so doing, he proposes a perhaps unintentional, but novel assertion that these (now) dated practices of Impressionism and Expressionism are direct, intuitive responses to notions of movement, youth, vigor, subjectivity, and urbanity. Lotti graduated with a BA from San Francisco State University in 1998 and has exhibited nationally and internationally. His work has been collected in the US, Europe, and Japan.